Peace in the Wilderness Read online

  “If you were saving heavy metals for space flight,” Kerry asked bluntly, “why did the Earth United pigeonhole Ben Thrusher's space drive?"

  Dr. Chapman started to answer, but the commander asked bluntly, “Do you know what the birth rate is?"

  Kerry didn't. “I understood,” he remarked with sarcastic emphasis, “that it was a statistic that could give aid and comfort to the enemy."

  “Any development of a new frontier tends to raise the birth rate explosively. That's fine. When we open the planets we'll need a high birth rate. But after the Three Days’ War—you remember—the crime wave was so terrific that both the Americas and the Asian Alliance had to throw their whole armies into policing.

  “With the high birth rate and scarce food supplies, most families couldn't get along unless both parents worked. With neglected children—and too few schools and teachers—crime skyrocketed. The emergency—even a non-existent one from outer space—let us pass drastic laws which the public wouldn't have accepted in peacetime. Food rationing. Conversion of luxury crops to food raising. The non-worker law for mothers of families. That was unpopular, but it did cut down juvenile crime."

  “And the curfew law,” Kerry said. “If there are no Pharigs, that's tyranny."

  “You're perfectly right,” the commander said. “But the Night Police drain off the unemployed population. It's cheaper to pay them, as a civilian army, than to maintain prison systems and public welfare programs. If a man is unemployed or unemployable, he goes in the Night Police and it's up to him and his intelligence whether he sweeps the streets or becomes responsible for the peace of a whole city."

  “So that was it!” Fallon muttered.

  Commander Lal rose restlessly and paced the room. “The curfew lights—crimes were worked mostly in darkness—brought the crime rate down right away. Getting rid of unemployment and starvation took away all excuse for crimes. There are no more victims of society. The only criminals now are those who commit crimes of passion, and we don't need to be sentimental about them any more. Most crime is prevented and the rest can be punished effectively. Attributing all crimes of violence to the Pharigs made crime, in the public eye, equivalent to saying inhuman or alien, and destroyed the superficial glamour around crime and violence.

  Dr. Chapman raised a hand and made the very protest that was on Kerry's lips. “But in a free society, certainly man has inherent rights and freedoms."

  The commander looked tired. “Yes. But freedom exists only where there is elbowroom for a man to move without gouging his neighbor's ribs. We just don't have it on Earth any more. And all idealistic statements to the contrary, no honest man needs that kind of freedom in these days.

  “Men have short working hours and ample leisure. Any further freedom is license we can't afford. We've had to keep the population fed and in order until we can find living space or a differential method of birth control. I mean by that, a way to lower the birth rate without also lowering the rate of intelligence-per-thousand."

  He looked at Kerry. “We could use your help."

  “To keep on hoaxing the people?"

  “No, to un-hoax them, if that is an allowable expression.” Commander Lal returned to his seat. “The Pharig invasion is almost over. When we get out into space, it will be simple to stage a few mock battles and defeat them conclusively—and forever."

  Fallon demanded, “But why not tell them the truth?"

  The Indian propped his elbows on the desk. He seemed worn out with his long explanation. The blazing insignia of Earth United seemed a glaring anachronism on his austere frame.

  “There is an Indian proverb,” he began slowly, “concerning the man who rode a tiger. He couldn't stay on and he was afraid to get off. Now that we're on the verge of leading the people of Earth out into space, suppose we did reveal that the Pharig invasion was a hoax staged for our own purposes. Then suppose we met a real alien race?"

  “Good lord,” said Kerry,

  “It's entirely possible."

  Chapman said, “I suppose history must eventually took at the Pharig invasion as a kind of air-raid drill."

  “Yes,” the Indian agreed, “To see whether Earthmen were capable of putting aside their individual concerns and functioning as a united world.” With an apologetic smile he touched the insignia he wore.

  Somehow to Kerry it seemed that the insignia was insignificant now and the man himself was the symbol of a greater power. Kerry slowly crumpled the editorial he still held in his hand, shredded it, and dropped the pieces on the desk. “You win, Commander."

  Fallon said, “But Ben—and my father. What about them?"

  “Ben Thrusher was a martyr,” Commander Lal said. He looked sorrowful, almost shaken. “But he was a martyr only to a lie. Go and write that editorial over again, Donalson. Make it an obituary instead, and make it good. Ben Thrusher—and Dr. Fallon, too—deserved it. Say, if you want to, that they gave their lives for space flight. It's true and they ought to rest in peace. Because the discovery of space flight means an end to the Pharigs. I'm not in the mood to think up famous last words."

  So even Ben's death was to be converted to the sober uses of expediency.

  “Maybe his own last words would do,” Kerry said bitterly. “'They make a wilderness and call it peace!’”

  The commander swung around. “Tacitus,” he said. “The words of a barbarian chief inciting his tribe to revolt against Rome. But Rome won, even though the barbarians sacked her. She kept peace, of a kind, until the very barbarians who destroyed her found time to repent and admire what they had destroyed, and a few of them remembered enough to preserve what they could.

  “Even the decadence of Rome was valuable in its way. So are the curfew and Night Police. If they lasted, it would be genuine decadence. It's almost over. The day of the barbarians and pioneers will begin again when the first rocket reaches Mars. But we've accomplished something."

  Lal pointed to the recruiting sign on the office wall, which Kerry and the others had taken so much for granted that they had not even noticed it.

  AN EARTH DIVIDED IS AN EARTH CONQUERED!

  “That sign means something,” the commander said. “Even Ben Thrusher would have admitted that. Although he died fighting it."

  And Kerry left with the first lines of the obituary already ringing in his head: “A martyr to the desire for freedom, Benedict Thrusher, listed as a dead man for eight years, died today after wresting from the Pharigs the secret of the space drive that will mean their eventual extermination from Earth..."

  And all the rest is written in history.

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